Monthly Archives: November 2010

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The screams and squawks from the usual suspects were predictable when the California Supreme Court did the economically and socially correct thing and that’s simply rule that undocumented workers that work hard in school to better themselves and become educated productive, citizens that enrich the educational and economic tapestry of the country should have a fair shot a completing their education at a cost that they can afford. That cost is not the whopping out of state tuition fees that exclude everyone except those who come from wealthy families from other states or countries.

The court ruling then was not about rewarding lawbreakers, draining hard pressed dollars from cash strapped state coffers to subsidize illegal aliens, and the ruling certainly did not symbolize the connivance of a liberal activist court (the decision was unanimous with conservative jurists backing it) to further turn California and the nation into a dirt poor province of Mexico and other Latin American countries.

In short the decision s not the end of American civilization as we know it to hear the yelps from the shrillest and most bigoted, and xenophobic about the decision. It was a decision for fairness and giving those whether they are here with papers or not that have worked and sacrificed to get a good education and contribute to society a fair chance to do just that. The Supreme Court on that count should be hailed not reviled for making the right call.

The good news about America is that when we send our military into a country–usually for defensive reasons, we do not remain in order to occupy or govern. The bad news is that we do remain. Whether former enemy or friend, we Yankees do not go home. It isn’t exactly like the bad old days of colonialism. We don’t really exploit them or tell them what to do. But we don’t go home.
Forgetting our two current wars, we are still in Bahrain, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Guam, Israel, Italy, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey and the UK. We are renting army and air force bases and naval installations and paying to have our military guard and protect our old enemies and friends. This costs us somewhere between $100 billion and $250 billion per year. Yes, that’s quite a spread, but our budgets are pretty opaque, and these seem to be the agreed upon parameters.

Yes, we know we could run a virtually deficit free budget if we weren’t fighting two wars and preparing to re-fight the Cold War. While experts suggest raising the retirement age, cutting Medicare and defunding our social safety net, we might consider building bridges instead of nuclear weapons and missiles. We do have more than enough bombs to incinerate the world.

Okay, to even suggest looking at military hardware is treasonous, so let’s just build the bombs and missiles as a kind of jobs program, but let’s also cut out $100 billion of our annual foreign base costs. Over ten years that is a trillion dollars. This doesn’t count “black ops” bases, prisons and the War on Drugs money or private contractors who often out number our in uniform troops.

Let’s look at our visible bases and figure out what we’re getting. Japan is not in love with our military. The people of the UK aren’t clear what we’re doing there. We should ask if a re-united Germany needs us to protect them–or to protect us from them? Neither, I suspect.

As for South Korea. They exist at our pleasure. If we went home, does anyone doubt the aggressive North would rain fire on them? And what do our 29,000 rent-paying, economy-supporting, life-sustaining troops buy us? Well, if you followed President Obama’s less than successful Asia tour, you’ll know the answer: Not much. We keep them alive and in power. We let them grow their economy and we ask only for reciprocal trade agreements. Give us, we beg, the same low tariffs on our cars as we give yours. They say No. The one place where clearly we make a difference, our efforts are important, and we get nothing.

It’s true. I love politics. I know it’s perverse, but it is just so much fun. Take the last election (PLEASE!). In the post-election we can see the difference between today’s Republicans and Democrats.

The Democrats got slaughtered. This was an epic defeat. Not simply in the number of congressional representatives they lost, but also the governorships and the state houses. This was Dunkirk, Gallipoli and Waterloo but without any discernable heroism. So, what do the Democrats do? Nothing. Does anyone fall on a sword or take responsibility? Of course not. It’s all passive voice like “Well, er, um, mistakes were made.” By whom? Unclear. In other societies someone takes the fall–responsible or not. There is accountability. The captain goes down with the ship. Other countries and cultures, the leadership resigns. Some places “falling on the sword” is not just an expression.

Here, the Democrats stand pat. They rest on their rejected laurels and give a vote of confidence to those who led them to this place. While White House staff jumps overboard for other opportunities, there is no evidence that anyone was pushed. As for the House…well Nancy Pelosi rather than resigning stands once more for election. This time not as Speaker of the House, but as Minority Leader. Ah, loyalty.

The Republicans, on the other hand, following a triumph, virtually unprecedented in nearly 70 years, cannot stand success and have no inclination to dance with them that brung them to the mountain top. Their Chair, Michael Steele, is a figure of derision. There are open cabals (if that itself isn’t a contradiction) to fire him. He is being strongly discouraged from running for a second term as party chair. Is Obama’s currency so debased that the Republicans no longer believe that they need their own Black man?

Meanwhile, some of the Republican victorious are acting like, well, old Democrats and lining up against their leaders. They are pledging their independence and posturing as if they’ll refuse to be led. Old-line conservatives are pulling their hard-sprayed hair out. Like Democrats they are angry at each other and devising purity tests that will exacerbate their difference as a matter of principle.

This is why politics is so much fun: Mediocrity is rewarded. Failure isn’t punished.
Posing is a judged competition. Mendacity is assumed
Best of all, even in an age of eternal life on the Net, what you say one day and contradict the next isn’t a problem.
2010 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

The California Supreme Court ruled that undocumented
students who have spent at least three years in a California High School have the right to instate university fees. The court wasn’t talking about the children of undocumented people who were born here; they are American citizens with equal rights. This decision conferred rights on children who are here illegally and gave them a better break on tuition than American citizens from other states.

Having lived abroad I know that the ability to go to school or get health benefits is virtually non-existent without papers. While it’s always impressive when our Supreme Court rules unanimously, there really seemed to be something wrong here. How is it possible legally to confer greater rights on non-citizens and non-legal residents than citizens?

This seems offensive both to reason and justice. Yet, I also felt a sense of pride–pride in our courts and our generosity. “Only in America,” I thought. For all our history of racism and exploitation of undocumented people, we demand less and give more to our foreign residents than anywhere else in the world.

Some believe we’re saps. Others believe that granting health and educational benefits make us stronger and safer.

In the absence of real immigration reform and control of our borders, we are faced with some pragmatic issues. If we can’t control immigration, are we better off with people being both healthy and educated? Germs don’t know about visas or citizenship papers. Ignorance leads to poverty–and while poverty does not cause crime, neither does it confer any societal benefit.

I would however tie tuition breaks to a form of the Dream Act and demand two years of public service (including military) to any recipient–after which full citizenship would be granted.
2010 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

Everyone is mad at Israel right now. So, what else is new? Israel is accused of being intransigent and provocative for building more homes and apartments. These actions, our major pundits explain, get in the way and sabotage the “peace process.”

According to the world, Israel always picks the wrong time to assert its right to build. It was wrong to announce plans when Vice President Biden was visiting Israel. It is wrong when Netanyahu is visiting America. These are both slaps at America and our credibility. They are analyzed as intentionally provocative.

Palestinian spokesmen announce that this new building plan (as every building plan) is unacceptable and means that Israel doesn’t want peace. This is nonsense and a good part of the reason that Israel is not very interested in currying the false-favor of the Arab World.

The truly sad fact is that neither the Arab World nor the Western World has given Israel any reason to care what they think. When every policy and program is met with rage and rejection, at some point normal people and normal nations just know that nothing will please their critics or mitigate the animus against them. If Israelis don’t actually stop caring about the world’s opinion, they stop acting as if they cared.

Israel withdraws from Gaza. The thanks? Maybe an opportunity to talk? You know better. The Palestinian response was Katusha rockets. A ten month moratorium on building housing on the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Arab response? No talks till the 9th month and no talks to continue unless the moratorium is permanent.

After years of arguing over a two state solution, Israel puts it on the table as an objective, and the negotiations begin. After a few years, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt says, “Well we want a two state solution with a free and independent Palestine and a secure Israel…but, of course, Israel can’t be a Jewish state.” Of course. Understandably Israelis are befuddled and wonder what they have been talking about and negotiating over when Israel’s very nature, identity and DNA are put on the table.

As with any normal individual receiving only criticism with no positive re-enforcement, Israel stops listening, stops respecting the opinions of others and stops believing in any goodwill on the part of the world.

Whatever Israel does is wrong. And the bottom line is that many Israelis now believe that no moratorium, no ceding of territories, no exchange of land, no dropping of checkpoints, no supplying of humanitarian supplies will create the one single concession that could bring peace to all–and that is the acceptance of a Jewish State in the Middle East.

Israeli experience is that this is the way that peace is sabotaged. When Prime minister Ehud Barak offered most of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem, the Palestinian response was to throw in a demand for the right of the descendents of Palestinians who were displaced at independence to come back. Never mind the virtually equal number of Jews exiled from Arab lands at the creation of Israel. The demand was not a tactic or an obstacle to overcome. It was a refusal to make peace with what they used to call The Zionist Entity. At least that was honest–an honest rejection of Israel’s right to exist.

With 45 majority Muslim countries in the world and 38 of them Muslim by law, one Jewish state is a racist apartheid nation? No wonder so many Israelis, and Jews the world over, just no longer care much for the opinion of the world.
2010Jonathan DobrerJonDobrer@mac.com

Life is unfair to satirists and farceurs.Reality is so weird that it cannot be exaggerated. Once upon a time, the comedian of the absurd, Steven Wright, wondered if before giving a lethal injection executioners swabbed his arm with alcohol?

This is no longer a joke. Well, yes it is, but it is also reality. Our courts are, at every level, dealing with how comfortable we need to assure that the people we kill are while we’re killing them. One execution was put on hold while a court decided if the use-by date having passed might have rendered one of the lethal drug illegal to use. What, it might have gone bad? What happens when deadly drugs are a week past their use-by date? Do they become good for you?

Another court was asked to decide if the condemned was entitled to the three-drug deadly cocktail or if the state could make do with only two deadly drugs? The two-drug mixture seemed to have worked, but some are very anxious over whether the dead guy (it is almost always a guy) might have had a few moments of pain.

Supporters of the death penalty wonder, reasonably if rhetorically, if the condemned man (and it is almost always a guy) expressed such refined sensitivities for whomever he killed.

Of course California is in the middle of this deadly muddle. We called off an execution because of the stale date of one of the drugs, Pentathol (generic sodium thiopental). Now Attorney General, and Governor elect, Jerry Brown assures us that he has found four doses of the drug that promise to remain deadly through 2114. Does this end our deadly dilemma? Of course not. You knew better, right?

Now the issue is the provenance of the sodium thiopental. Since there is some issue of transparency, opponents of the death penalty are complaining that the drug may have been imported from Europe. And in an extension of the old question about why we can’t import drugs from abroad, they are saying that European drug standards might not be as good as ours, and we cannot assure the condemned man (Yeah, I know) and his family that European sodium thiopental is “safe and effective.” Safe!?!

Since this is what doctors call, off the books use, it is hard to imagine the protocols for determining their efficacy. I mean do you pick a whole bunch of people and kill them using a double blind methodology, and how would you measure your results from either group of now dead people. Conducting interviews concerning pain levels would take some very talented mediums–and there are only a small number of mediums at large.

Not even hard scientific results would end the controversies. Since killing is not what the drug is designed and manufactured to do, and since no European country has the death penalty, anti-death penalty people in Europe are trying to forbid the exportation of sodium thiopental to the United States for the improper use of killing people.

All of this clearly masks the real issue which is the death penalty itself. We certainly know well enough how to kill people. We do it all the time by medical error and drug overdose. For pro-death penalty people worrying about whether death has a sting is a cruel irony. For anti-death penalty people there is no conceivable protocol that would pass muster.

Personally, I’m not a fan of the death penalty because we have not proven to be even-handed in it giving it–killing far too many poor dark-skinned males and not nearly any semblance of proportional representation of white women. Still, if we are to have it, let’s stop being silly and surpassing our leading absurdists.

We all know that pain is more than physical and that psychological pain and anxiety can be far crueler than a stinging shot. With giving the condemned dates for death and moving them, there is some considerable cruelty. In giving the families of their victims dates and moving them–sometimes for decades–there is clear cruelty.

In worrying about the safe use of drugs used for killing we are subjecting reason to cruel and unusual punishment.

Our long national nightmare is ended.Keith is coming back from his “indefinite (two night) suspension.” The public has spoken–left and right–and agreed that MSNBC’s policy, while legal, was crazy.

Here it is: “Anyone working for NBC News who takes part in civic or other outside activities may find that these activities jeopardize his or her standing as an impartial journalist because they may create the appearance of a conflict of interest. Such activities may include participation in or contributions to political campaigns or groups that espouse controversial positions. You should report any such potential conflicts in advance to, and obtain prior approval of, the President of NBC News or his designee.”

The heart (no brain here) of the policy is the legitimate fear that news people who contribute time, money or endorsements to political campaigns: “jeopardize his or her standing as an impartial journalist because they may create the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Okay, we can see the relevance to Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams or David Gregory. But is there any doubt on the political position of MSNBC or its “hosts?” When you have on air advocates like Keith or Rachel there is the obvious fact of their political passions. There is no mere appearance. They are not playing at reporting or being impartial. Being a partisan advocate on air surely frees one to be morally and fiscally consistent in private.

Former President George W. Bush seems to be about the only top Republican in the land who hasn’t taken a shot at President Obama. There’s not one, I repeat, not one single word of criticism of Obama’s performance to date in the White House in Bush’s near 500 page memoir, Decision Points. In fact, forget the word criticism, the times that Bush mentions Obama in the book he practically gushes over him on everything from the handling of the Afghanistan war to the economic crisis.

The easy answers for why Bush’s love fest with the president is that he’s a much maligned, much reviled former president who finds it prudent to take the statesmanlike high ground, and shower praise on his successor, lest he run the grave risk of putting his failed, flawed, bumbling and blundering policies back on the table as fair game for attack. Another answer is that he’s simply following presidential protocol, and that is speak no ill of your successor. Or, that he’s trying to peddle a book, and since it’s not a sex and smut gossipy, tabloid tell all, he and the book must come off looking and sounding politically revealing, intriguing, and informative, to get the cash registers jingling on book sales. These undoubtedly are sensible reasons for Bush’s gratuitous deference to Obama. But there are other reasons that are even more compelling.
Obama has in part through political necessity, pragmatism, and political belief followed in some of Bush’s footsteps. The two most prominent things that Bush praised him for are the handling of the Afghan war and the economic crisis. Obama and Bush have been in lockstep agreement that the war should be waged, and waged to win, and that the US would spend whatever it takes, and make whatever military sacrifices that have to be made to insure that. At every stage of the presidential campaign, Obama’s speeches, and his action to escalate the war once in the White House, confirmed that he meant business on this. It was virtually the same tough, unrelenting position that Bush struck on Iraq. If you’re George W. Bush you can’t help but like this and cheer lead Obama for it. If you’re Bush you also have to like Obama’s willingness to leave virtually untouched the deals worked out to rescue the banks, the Wall Street houses, and keep in place as your top economic advisors and micro managers those with close ties to the banking and corporate leaders, and who will play it close to the vest on tax, spending, and budget decisions.

Then there’s the way things are done in the White House. Obama like Bush did what every other new president does during his first two years in office. He used the early public goodwill to make politically favorable appointments, ink executive orders and push through Congress programs that likely would draw fire later on, while exerting a tight grip on executive power, and casting an eye on building a favorable historic legacy. In Bush’s first address to Congress, he cast himself as the education president, talked about health care reform, and made a vague promise to tackle paying off the national debt. Obama has repeatedly talked about these issues, up to and including carbon copying and tweaking one of Bush’s few signature achievements, the No Child Left Behind initiative.

Obama like Bush took big campaign hits for being a foreign policy novice and has moved just as quickly to meet and talk with foreign leaders, embark on a busy round of state visits, and try to repair the monumental damage that Bush did in poisoning relations with America’s allies. But at the same time, Bush staunchly backed a national missile defense system in Europe. So did Obama initially. He called a missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland the most cost-effective and proven defense system. He tied the decision to go ahead with it directly to Iran’s nuclear threat and international security concerns. Obama backed away from it on the recommendation from the Pentagon, but a truncated version of the system is not entirely off the military and diplomatic table.

There’s much to like and admire from Bush’s view about Obama, but that alone wouldn’t be enough to explain his heap of praise on him. The final clue to why he does came following a meeting with Obama immediately after the election. He applauded him for shoring up GM and the other automakers. Bush quipped to his economic team, “I won’t dump this mess on them.” Bush did but he didn’t just dump it on Obama dumped the mess on the nation too. For that he can’t afford to utter a word of criticism about the effort he’s made to clean up that mess he made.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk shows on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

MSNBC suspended Keith Olbermann indefinitely. What was Keith’s shocking transgression?Did he libel the president of the company? Did he commit high crimes and misdemeanors? No. MSNBC was shocked, SHOCKED to find out that Keith (are you ready for it?) supported three Democrats running for office.

Oh the surprise. The betrayal. A political pundit has an opinion. It must be said not a very secret opinion; and he doesn’t just opine, pontificate and blow hot air, he actually acts in a way consistent with both his values and his on-air persona.

Is MSNBC shocked that Keith is not objective? Has Keith violated the code of the news reporter who is supposed to pretend to being objective? He couldn’t break the code because he is not a reporter. He is an opinion guy. That’s his job.

Does MSNBC not position itself as a partisan player, “Leaning forward” and to the left? Like the NPR Juan Williams debacle, this stinks of policies that are ill-considered and of hypocrisy. The only difference between Keith and Juan is that Keith has better ratings. In fact he has the best ratings on the network. You sinking suits at MSNBC better think this through again.

South Carolina GOP Senator Jim DeMint gloating in the aftermath of the GOP House wipeout crowed that the election sent a message that the country rejected Obama’s policies. The message was not a message but a warning that Obama must toe the GOP line or as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just as bluntly put it the GOP will fulfill its goal of making him a one term president. President Obama now more than ever must turn a tin ear to Jim DeMint and House Republican hawks.

Polls show that voters want Congress to work with the president on solving the nation’s problems, starting with the economy. They do not want a repeat of 1994 when a hardball, pig headed GOP leadership shut down government and caused national angst and misery. They want home foreclosure relief, to give health care reform a chance to work, keep hands off financial reform, and an end to the Iraq and Afghan wars. The polls showed that they hold Congress and that includes the GOP in far lower popular esteem than Obama.

The White House must not to panic, be bullied by the Tea Party egged on House GOP hawks, or swallow the media mantra that the election was somehow a total rejection of Obama’s initiatives. FDR didn’t panic in the face of 1938 midterm losses. He stayed the course, remained true to his populist faith, turned the tables back on his foes, and dared them to move the country forward not backward. Obama should do no less and turn a tin ear to the right.